While I was in Serbia, I read a book by a Serbian Noble Peace Prize winner named Ivo Andric.  He wrote about the turmoils that occur in the Balkan region, especially Bosnia.  Here is an exert from his book The Bosnian Chronicles that I recently began reading.  I thought that it was so beautiful and poetic and really hit home with me and how I am beginning to feel about life.  So here it is.  Maybe it will hit home with you as well :)

"So long as a man leads a normal, ordered life among his own kind, such details of his career represent important phases and significant turning points in his life, but as soon as chance, illness, or an assignment separate and isolate him, these highlights begin suddenly to fade and gutter, to wither and shrivel like so many paper-mache masks that one has no use for any more.  And from underneath there begins to emerge our other life, known to only ourselves, the "true" story of our spirit and body, one that has not been set down anywhere and which no other person can begin to guess at, a story that has no visible connection with our successes in society but which, in the final tally of good and evil in our existence, is the only concrete and decisive one"
-Ivo Andric